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Sunday, 7 April 2019

Britain's courts are open to abuse by wealthy men, says woman sued for Facebook defamation

When Nicola Coates was pushed against a sofa by her husband who put his hands on her throat and "tried to strangle" her she thought it would be one of the most terrifying experiences of her life. In fact, those fleeting moments in which she feared that she might die were just the beginning of a much bigger ordeal. Her description of the attack on Facebook, written in the heat of the moment as she struggled to come to terms with spending Christmas apart from her son, was later dissected word for word by a judge who admitted that he didn’t understand social media. Using a Victorian law the comment was defined by the Oxford English Dictionary and it was ruled on that basis she had defamed her husband by implying that he was trying to kill her. Now, just days after that decision was overturned by the highest court in the land, she has spoken in detail about her experience for the first time. Miss Coates, who was named in court papers as Stocker but has now reverted to her maiden name, believes the British Courts are being “abused by rich men” and need to “catch up” with the realities of modern life. “I think there is a pattern of women being threatened with the courts and to be quite honest most people don’t want to go through what I have been through,” she said. “The whole judiciary needs to catch up and they need to realise that courts are being used to silence and control women, and that’s not being recognised. In some cases it’s an extension of the abusive relationship that is already there.” Ronald Stocker and Deborah Bligh arriving for the Supreme Court hearing The family courts are particularly vulnerable to abuse and men with the “bigger cheque books” can hire multiple barristers and bring the case back to court again and again, she warned. Many people would have walked away as they saw the legal bills soaring to almost £200,000, but as she celebrated her victory Miss Coates said: “I never wanted to give up because I knew I told the truth.” She fell in love with Ronald Stocker and they married in 1999 before she gave birth to their only son. But the cracks soon began to show and in 2003 an argument escalated into the incident which years later would be relived in court rooms as the topic of her Facebook post. The police arrived around two hours later as she was packing her bags and found reddening on her neck still. “Maybe it would have been better if I had left him then, but I didn’t and you can’t change that,” said Miss Coates. They stayed together for another seven years but in the end she “chose to leave, which was possibly my biggest crime in the world”. Nicola Coates has reverted to her maiden name after her divorce from Mr Stocker Credit: JULIAN SIMMONDS Looking back she can see things that she didn’t then, and now feels that she was controlled by him. The couple divorced in 2012 and on 23 December that year his new lover Deborah Bligh wrote on Facebook that she was looking forward to waking up with “my man and his son” on Christmas Day. In the following exchange between the two women, which Miss Coates maintains she thought was a private conversation, she revealed that her ex-husband had “tried to strangle me”. She though little more of the conversation, and tried to limit her contact with Mr Stocker. But their battles in the family courts continued and he threatened her with libel in April 2013. “It was horrific when I found out he was taking me to court,” Miss Coates remembers. “I had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and I had spent so much money fighting him through the family courts I definitely didn’t have money to fight a libel claim. “I thought why would you put the mother of your child through this? Why would you put your child through this when he has already gone through enough?” Her ex-husband on the other hand, a millionaire businessman who dabbled in property development, had very deep pockets. In the middle of her chemotherapy she turned up at the offices of David Price QC, who agreed to represent her on a no-win no-fee basis. Speaking from her home in Longwick, Buckinghamshire, which she turned into a B&B; in the wake of her divorce in order to pay the bills, she said: “I was quite confident. What I had said was the truth, I had the police reports.” After some delays so that she could concentrate on her cancer treatment, the couple faced each other in the High Court in 2016. But as the judge summed up the case he described Mr Stocker as a “shrewd and successful businessman” and her heart sank. “It was as if domestic abuse couldn’t happen in middle England,” Miss Coates remembered. And then he delivered the fatal blow - that the dictionary defines strangle as either "to kill by external compression of the throat” or painfully constricting the neck. The judge said that "he had succeeded” in painfully constricting her neck, and therefore by using the words “tried to” she must have meant her ex was trying to kill her. This was defamatory as Mr Stocker’s “intention was to silence, not to kill”, Mr Justice Mitting ruled. As she walked out of court deflated a young female solicitor told Miss Coates: “I can’t believe what (the judge) said in there, it was so wrong.” “And at that moment I knew that I would hate it if she was in a relationship where she had been assaulted and then a judge just thought that that was fine,” she said. She said that she could not let this become a “definition of acceptable behaviour” or allow the judiciary to have “a complete disregard for women’s safety”. “I don’t want another woman to be in a position where they can’t stand up and say this is wrong,” she said. She appealed the ruling and Lady Justice Sharp, the only female judge on the panel, began asking questions about the original incident. Miss Coates said. “She said that it must have been terrifying and a really frightening experience and I though at last, someone gets it.” But whatever sympathy there may have been the appeal was denied. Finally last week the Supreme Court overturned the two previous rulings, with the judges noting that the reader of Facebook does not over-analyse things but their response is “fleeting and impressionistic”. Mr Stocker told the Telegraph that he was “disappointed by the ruling”, but added that the “trial judge found against my ex-wife regarding many of the allegations made about me and these findings were not appealed. We both need to move on from our unhappy marriage and put these proceedings behind us.” For Miss Coates, who has become involved with the Centre for Women’s Justice and met other women in similar situations, moving on will be educating others on the dangers of abusive relationships. “Many women in relationships believe that they have failed, because that is what they are being told, that they are not good enough," she said. “Hopefully out of my case and other high profile cases awareness will be raised. “Our children are educated in school on how to avoid being groomed into joining the Taliban or being groomed by sexual predators, but they are not educated about coercive control. “Bruises are something that you can see and understand, but mental abuse can be just as damaging and people need to be educated in that.” She hopes to help but it is not without awareness that her life has been completely transformed by that Facebook comment. “David [Price] said to me when we won ‘I bet you didn’t think you would be a feminist idol at the end of this’,” she laughed. “And I didn’t, but I also didn’t do it for me. I did it for a much bigger picture than me - to stand up for what is right.”